As I sit here pondering a new direction in life that is on the horizon, I've been wondering about things to this point. I tend to think of myself as a creative person. I may not be the best at anything that I do, but I like to think I'm a bit better than average. It just makes me wonder. I've tried to do all sorts of creative things over the years. Reflecting back on each one of my endeavors, it's sad to say that almost each one has been full of Epic Fail™. I've tried lots of things over the years. I enjoy doing most of them, but it's frustrating to see all the work I put into things and nothing really coming of it. I've put so many things out into the world and it hard to see that little to no one is paying attention. I think the only thing I've ever done that people have paid any attention to was my work with Richard and Wendy Pini of Elfquest fame. And that's attention by association. Not really anything of my doing. But I look at things like @anime!, my online anime magazine. Or my photography. Or my design "business". If you look at any of those, none of them could be considered anything close to what could be called a success.

So as I sit here staring at this computer screen, I have to wonder. Is it even worth the time to do anything creative on my own anymore? I've got lots of projects that I work on that, frankly, don't ever amount to anything. I'm wondering if it's worth it to keep pouring time and effort into these things. Should I just kill them all and try to move on to something else? It's quite the quandary. And I don't really know what to do. Art. Design. Writing. Photography... it all seems so worthless if there's no one to look at it or use it. It's even harder a thing when you think about the fact that I've been doing all this stuff for more than half my life. It's really all that I know.

I've been trying to figure out how to move forward. School will be starting up again in a few weeks. I swore to myself that I wouldn't go back, but I don't think I really have much choice. I'll be going a direction that I have a feeling won't be an easy one. I'm starting into Business Management with a Marketing focus. I have to be honest, I hate the business side of business. I really prefer to do the creative stuff. But after almost 20 years in the design world, I don't think I can get anywhere in that world anymore. Being a designer just doesn't seem to cut it anymore. I don't want to go into management, but after 20 years as a designer, management is the only place for me to go now it seems. Having a job where I won't be able to design isn't what I think I'll like, but there's little else for me to do without changing fields completely and I don't want to do that either.

And then there's the bad economy.

It's quite the dilemma. And I don't know what to do.

I'm tired and just want to move on, but it seems that I can't. Somewhere, there's an answer. I just hope that I can find it.

Posted by Tim at 8:07 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I came across an article today on Fast Company. It's about a "designer," Dustin Curtis and his reaction to the current website for American Airlines.

He gives three (exceptionally arrogant) suggestions:

1. Treat this as a serious emergency across your entire company. Your shortfalls in customer experience do not stop at the website. Your company is losing money every day because customers hate the way you treat them. And it appears that you are doing nothing to fix this.

2. Fire your entire design team, if you have one. Hire an outside design firm ... as quickly as possible. Your in-house team is obviously incapable of building a good experience. Get outside help.

3. Follow the lead of new, young, and innovative airlines like JetBlue and Virgin America. They know how to harness repeat business through excellent customer experience.

For No. 1, I think he tends to forget what industry he's complaining at. This is the airline industry. Overall, the airline industry is stuck with what they have. Costs are going up and income is going down. Arguments like "Your company is losing money every day because customers hate the way you treat them. And it appears that you are doing nothing to fix this." is a sad outlook at the way the world works. Mr. Curtis thinks that customer service is only a one way street. I'm sure consumers don't treat the airlines any better. Not that that is an excuse, but trying to make like these big companies aren't doing anything to make customer experiences better is silly at best and downright ignorant at worst. And then there's a little thing called "competition". Companies lose money everyday because there are others out there that do the same things for cheaper.

#2. Fire your entire design team and hire who? Someone like Mr. Curtis here who apparently doesn't know how the business side of the design world works? The arrogance of someone like Mr. Curtis is EXACTLY one big reason why "normal" people hate "designers". (Heck, people like Mr. Curtis make real designers hate "designers".) As a design professional, I'm appalled and disappointed at people who throw around idiotic blabber like this and then go around claiming that they're a "designer". That kind of talk is the kind of garbage that you hear from all these new, trendy "designers" that claim to have gone to "design school" and have all the answers.

And #3, well, I think we're missing how the airline industry works today. Back in the 60s, or 70s, heck, even the 80s, people were loyal to one airline. In my day, United was my airline of choice. Today? There IS no loyalty cause it's all about getting the cheapest flight available. That's why places like Orbitz, Priceline and Travelocity came into being. It's not about sticking with who you're loyal to. It's how much can I get for as little as possible. Today, we take whatever flight from whatever company is the cheapest and throw loyalty out the window. JetBlue and Virgin, while nice, aren't anything that you can compare to the BIG airlines. Once JetBlue and Virgin get to the same size as United, American and the like, their " excellent customer experience" will turn the same direction. It's just the nature of the corporate world. Hate to burst your bubble there, Mr, Curtis.

Ultimately, what poor Mr. Curtis doesn't seem to understand is that there are some lines between design and functionality. Sure, the world would be an excellent place if all design was pretty and everything everywhere looked as good as designers wanted them to. But that's not the world we live in. In the case of American Airlines, I understand where they're coming from. Having done webwork for both the "mom and pop" shop and the big, corporate giants, I know EXACTLY how AA.com came into being. In the big, corporate world, things like websites are designed by committee. You have different departments within a big company that have their piece of the website and that's all they really care about. When you take 100 of these different little pieces and have to smash them all together, that's where "pretty" design gets thrown out the window. You have to make sacrifices to please all the parts of the committee. And sacrifices rarely lead to "pretty" design, especially on the web.

The truly tragic thing here is how this was all presented. Yes, there's horrible design out there. There's plenty of it out there. I've dealt with it for almost 20 years. But there's a way to tell someone that their website sucks. Mr. Curtis' method is exactly how NOT to tell someone.

But all this is probably currently beyond his grasp. Someday, hopefully Mr. Curtis will learn all this.

Probably when someone pops his art school, trendy designer bubble and he realizes that he's in the real world, not some ideal design world that he's apparently living in right now.

Posted by Tim at 4:37 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

So, for those not in the know, I've been in the middle of getting my Bachelor of Fine Arts degree finished up and I just got done with my last "real" semester. I had to do a big gallery show as my final project and the topic I used was the evolution of entertainment advertising over the last 100 years. It was a rather labor intensive project. I took my webcomic, Beyond Neverwonder, and used it as a guinea pig for the project. I analyzed the design styles of movie posters from 1912 to 2009 and then I took different time periods and did a Beyond Neverwonder movie poster using the design elements and styles of the different periods.

Well, the project is finally done and the remains can be found online. The website has it's own home at www.evoentad.com. There you can see the flash site that was part of the gallery show.

The posters can be found on my deviantArt site. Links are below.

Beyond Neverwonder 2000s Style by =tekitsune on deviantART

Beyond Neverwonder 1980s Style by =tekitsune on deviantART

Beyond Neverwonder 1960s Style by =tekitsune on deviantART

Beyond Neverwonder 1940s Style by =tekitsune on deviantART

Enjoy! :)

Posted by Tim at 4:49 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Direct from my sketchbook to everyone out there! :)

I've been playing with some new characters and some different drawing styles. I'm liking the look I think. Just need to play around some more. And I need to come up with a name for our girl here.

I'm a day late for Christmas, but I was enjoying being lazy yesterday, so I'm using that as my good excuse. Hope everyone out there is having a wonderful holiday season!

For the curious:
Based on a pencil sketch
Colored in Adobe Photoshop CS3
Time: ~2 hours

Posted by Tim at 6:38 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I'm a bit late with this week's "Tail." I was in Las Vegas over the weekend for the Las Vegas bowl football game and didn't have Internet access until I got home late yesterday. But, better late than never, so here's this week's.

Astuteo is a nice, simple website for Matt Everson's design studio. He keeps things simple by using only one page to get all his information across. The navigation bar is unobtrusive. The use of red behind the logo provides a great contrast to the white background and the brown colors used in the navigation bar. His samples keep it nice and simple as well, giving you just enough to be interesting while not giving away everything he's trying to show.

Go check out the simplicity of the Astuteo site at http://www.astuteo.com/

Posted by Tim at 4:22 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)